Summer school no more: Oxnard Union leans on online credit recovery program

There were times during the last four years that Camarillo High School senior Vanessa Morales had fallen so far behind in her coursework that she wasn't sure she'd ever be able to catch up.

But in June, thanks to a handful of courses from a new district online credit recovery program, Morales is set to graduate alongside her classmates.

"If (the program) wasn't a thing, I probably wouldn't be walking that stage," she said.

Morales isn't alone. Five years ago, Oxnard Union High School District had the lowest graduation rate in Ventura County. Just 85.4% of the class of 2019 graduated.

That rate fell even further in the first two classes after the start of the pandemic, hitting a low of 82.4% in 2021.

But in the last few years, the county's largest school district has begun to rewrite its trajectory. In 2022, 90% of district seniors graduated and last spring, 89.5% received diplomas.

The biggest driver of that turnaround might be the Oxnard Online Credit Recovery program, launched during the 2021-22 school year. The program supplements summer school and Saturday school — the traditional fallbacks for students who fall behind — with four-week online capsules designed to run concurrently with regular coursework.

Over three years, the district of about 18,000 students has so far delivered more than 30,000 online credit recovery courses to students. Each year, between 3,000 and 4,000 students benefit from the program.

Though short, the courses aren't cake walks: Students recover credits at a roughly 60% clip.

The program is, in part, a silver lining from several years of disasters. The Thomas and Woolsey fires were a catalyst for the district to begin revamping its online offerings, program coordinator Aaron Ferguson said. The district started building courses in 2019, before the pandemic "turbocharged" development by forcing schools online, he said.

For Jake McMullen, another Camarillo High senior who will be graduating in June, the rapid recovery format was a lifeline after he fell about a year behind by his sophomore year.

He had all but given up, he said, but one online course at a time, he worked his way back. This year, after more than a dozen courses in his sophomore and junior years, he didn't need to take a single recovery course.

"It helped motivate me," he said.

Why it's different

District leaders say it's not a coincidence that graduation rates went up in the program's first year. The district's data, when compared to the county and state, also suggests that the improvement is more than a post-pandemic bump.

Oxnard Union was 2 ½ percentage points below the state graduation rate in 2019. Last year, the district had climbed half a percentage point above the state rate.

Over that five-year period, no other district in the county improved its graduation rate more than Oxnard Union. Most had 2023 graduation rates about the same or lower than in 2019.

What makes Oxnard Union's online program different from the district's earlier tactics is that each course is built and taught in-house by district teachers, not purchased pre-written from a vendor, and runs concurrently with the regular school semester.

Teachers are required to check in with students in person or by video chat once each week of the course. Staff get extra pay for each course they teach, Ferguson said, with some of the funding redirected from the pre-packaged curriculum services the district used before.

It took time for some teachers to buy in with some carrying concerns that the program wouldn't be sufficiently rigorous, he said. But three years in, it's become part of campus culture.

The approach aims to strike a balance between allowing students to work at their own pace and providing enough oversight and support to ensure students are actually learning.

The graded courses aren't just for students trying to earn credit for a failed class. Students can also use them to improve low grades to meet the A-G requirements — the admissions standards of the University of California and California State University systems.

At four weeks, each course is significantly shorter than a normal three to four month semester, but program leaders said the courses are not designed to deliver an entire semester of material, but to shore up learning gaps and give a second chance to students who might have merely been poor test takers or had homework-hungry dogs.

"Adults get second chances," Camarillo High counselor Viridiana Rodriguez said. "We all need second chances."

The approach works better for some courses than others. Cameron Salehi, the district's director of instructional support services, said the program has worked particularly well for special education students who get a double-length online course with an extra instructor.

World languages and classes for English language learners, on the other hand, have so far not translated to the internet because it's so much more effective to learn to listen and speak languages in person.

Ferguson, himself a former Pacifica High School teacher, said the district has some courses that are taught across multiple of the district's 10 campuses, but that organizers try to keep courses within single campuses when it is possible.

That means that students can sometimes take a credit recovery course with the same teacher from whom they took the original course.

Morales said studying with teachers who work on her campus has changed the tenor of the online coursework. On occasion, she said, some have tracked her down in regular classes to check in about outstanding work.

"They're always there to help," she said.

For Itchel Rubio, another Camarillo High senior whose transcript includes a handful of online credit recovery classes, it's the slower, online environment that made a world of difference.

In some traditional math lectures, she said, she found herself "racing" to keep up. The online credit recovery courses, with their focused teacher attention and self-driven pacing, worked better for her.

"It was a lot easier," she said. "I was going at my own pace."

The program is still a work in progress. Ferguson said staff have made tweaks in each of its three years so far. But for Morales, Rubio, McMullen and others who will graduate in a month, it's already been effective where it counts.

Isaiah Murtaugh covers education for the Ventura County Star in partnership with Report for America. Reach him at isaiah.murtaugh@vcstar.com or 805-437-0236 and follow him on Twitter @isaiahmurtaugh and @vcsschools. You can support this work with a tax-deductible donation to Report for America.

This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Oxnard Union students lean on online credit recovery program